November 1963: that was the by-election that was | The Independent November 1963: that was the by-election that was REAR WINDOW: KINROSS AND WEST PERTHSHIRE Friday 10 March 1995 00:02 BST Click to follow Indy Lifestyle Online THE outcome of the 1963 Kinross and West Perthshire by-election, held on 7 November, was never seriously in doubt, but it remains one of the most celebrated of post-war by-elections and the only one in which a prime minister stood as candidate. In the coming weeks, much of the same rural territory will be trodden in the by-election to find a replacement for Sir Nicholas Fairbairn. It is unlikely to be as memorable a happening, though it may be a useful reminder of how much has changed (and how much has stayed the same) since 1963. An extraordinary sequence of events led to the 14th Earl of Home offering himself to the electorate of Kinross and West Perthshire - a constituency which fitted him like a glove and which he represented until retiring from the Commons in 1974.

There were few more feudal or more solidly Tory corners of the kingdom than rural Perthshire. For most of the electorate, even during the Tory melt-down months of 1963, the appearance of an earl who was temporarily obliged to become a commoner for the purpose of being prime minister, was too good to be true. It was a year which had produced the Profumo scandal, a series of spy dramas and Dr Beeching's plans for the railways. Harold Macmillan's administration went into free-fall in the opinion polls, and pressure mounted for him to resign. On 8 October, he went into hospital leaving RA Butler to chair the Cabinet. A file of contenders and party grandees trooped into the King Edward VII Hospital for discussions. These were the days when leaders of the Conservative Party "emerged" rather than triumphed through any electoral process, and on 18 October Macmillan advised the Queen to send for Lord Home - the first peer to become prime minister since Lord Salisbury in 1895. By the early 1960s, however, the idea of a prime minister in the Lords was unacceptable. This was where chance recent events came to the aid of Home.

Earlier in 1963, Parliament had passed the Peerage Act allowing hereditary peers to renounce their titles on accession, or within 12 months of the passing of the Act. The new prime minister quickly set about doing so. He had, however, to remain in Parliament. The Tory MP for Kinross and West Perthshire, Gilmour Leburn, had died in August at the age of 50. George Younger was to be the Tory candidate in a by-election scheduled for 7 November. Younger agreed to stand down, was found a seat in Ayr instead and never had cause to look back. Sir Alec Douglas-Home, as he now became, was nominated as Conservative and Unionist candidate, and the shortest by- election circus in modern political history was under way. Sir Alec combined the roles of prime minister and candidate. A colourful field lined up against him, including Willy Rushton. It was the hey-day of BBC Television's That Was the Week That Was, on which Rushton was accustomed to playing Macmillan, while Lance Percival sent up Home.

However, his opening meeting in Killin attracted an audience of 300 who heard Rushton go "lightly and scathingly through the Prime Minister's life" and "frequently mimicking" the great man. Killin had seen nothing like it before. Rushton announced that his candidacy was a protest against "the completely arrogant way Lord Home has moved into Downing Street". This reflected a widespread resentment and sense of astonishment throughout the country, though Perth and Kinross itself was the least likely breeding ground for such sentiments of lse majest. Sir Alec went on his stately way through the constituency. Opponents protested when schoolchildren were given a half-day to cheer his presence. The Glasgow Herald reported admiringly how he combined the roles of candidate and statesman. "In the morning, suitably dressed in an old tweed knickerbocker suit, thick woollen socks and stout shoes, he went hill- farming...This evening, he took off, as Prime Minister, for London." But while the style was quintessential grouse-moors Toryism, the political message makes curiously consensual reading today.

When Sir Alec addressed "1,000 cheering women voters" in Crieff, he advised them that the policy of the Conservative Party was "not greedy materialism". To enhance all- round prosperity, he said, "we have set up the National Economic Development Council in which the Government, industry and trade unions are co-operating. For, if Britain is to prosper, all must play their part." The by-election outcome was never in doubt. The Tory share of the vote dropped to a healthy 58 per cent, the Liberals came second and Rushton received 45 votes. Asked if he intended to buy a house in the constituency, Sir Alec replied: "Good heavens, no. I have too many houses already." The Liberals called for a ban on opinion polls during by-elections, describing them as "a dangerous interference in the democratic process". On the same night, the Tories lost Luton where Charles Hill, "the Radio Doctor", had been unwisely elevated to the peerage. Their defeat soon proved to be a more prophetic guide to the mood of the country than Sir Alec Douglas-Home's triumph in the glens of Perthshire. The writer is the Labour MP for Cunninghame North.

More about: History of Sir Alec Douglas-Home - GOV.UK Political party Conservative Sir Alec Douglas-Home only served as Prime Minister for 363 days but he oversaw the abolition of resale price maintenance and took a tough stance in dealing with the trade unions. Sir Alec Douglas-Home was born in Mayfair, London, into an aristocratic family. He attended Eton College followed by Oxford University, where he graduated with a third class BA in Modern History. He also played first class cricket for prominent clubs. In 1931, he entered Parliament as a Scottish Unionist Party (combined with the Conservative Party in 1965) MP for Lanark. As Parliamentary Private Secretary to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain from 1937 to 1939, he attended the Munich Conference in 1938, though he was not tainted by the fallout. Severe illness during the Second World War prevented him from active participation, and he lost his seat in the 1945 General Election. After his father passed away, he became the 14th Earl of Home and took a seat in the House of Lords.

He served as Commonwealth Secretary during the Suez Crisis of 1956, in addition to holding the positions of Leader of the House of Lords and Lord President of the Council. In 1959, the Conservative Party under Harold Macmillan won the General Election. The following year, he was appointed Foreign Secretary. He remained in the role until 18 October 1963, when Macmillan suddenly resigned due to a prostate condition that was exacerbated by the Profumo Affair. Douglas-Home’s emergence as the new leader of the Conservative Party attracted some claims that Macmillan had worked to make sure ‘The Magic Circle’ deny Rab Butler the leadership, but Reginald Maudling had also been a strong candidate. Even so, he rejected his peerage on 23 October 1963 and became Sir Alec Douglas-Home. On 7 November he contested and won the constituency of Kinross and West Perthshire – but for the 2 weeks in between he was a Prime Minister who belonged to neither the House of Commons nor the House of Lords. He did not originally seek the position of Prime Minister, but was widely respected by his party and its future leaders.

By the time he took over, the Conservative Party had been in office for 12 years and had contested 3 elections; Sir Alec Douglas-Home was the fourth party leader during the period. In contrast, Harold Wilson was a fearful leader of the Labour Party. Despite this, Sir Alec Douglas-Home concentrated heavily on winning the next election and as a result he narrowed the Labour lead in the opinion polls. As his biographer D R Thorpe notes, the legacy of his government was the abolition of resale price maintenance, which enabled the cut price stickers on goods we see today. The reform – led by President of the Board of Trade Edward Heath – faced opposition within the party, but Sir Alec Douglas-Home held firm and the bill was eventually passed. He also took a tough stance in dealing with the trade unions. During Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s premiership, American President John F Kennedy was assassinated, and relations with Kennedy’s successor Lyndon B Johnson deteriorated after the sale of British Leyland buses to Cuba. Macmillan famously described Sir Alec Douglas-Home to the queen as ‘steel painted as wood’.

Sir Alec Douglas-Home was an unexpected Prime Minister and served for only 363 days, the second shortest premiership in the 20th century – but he pushed his plan as he did not see any reason why the Conservative Party would not win a fourth term. The general election held on 15 October 1964 saw Wilson win a 4-seat majority. Despite defeat, he went on to serve as Foreign Secretary throughout Edward Heath ’s premiership from 1970 to 1974. Lewis Baston: The day 50 years ago when our last unelected Prime Minister faced the voters | Conservative Home Lewis Baston: The day 50 years ago when our last unelected Prime Minister faced the voters Lewis Baston: Wilson. Attlee. Major. The costs, gains and consequences of devaluation Lewis Baston is author of Reggie: The Life of Reginald Maudling and several books about British general elections. He is a consultant on politics, elections and constituencies. Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of one of history’s most peculiar by-elections.

When Kinross and West Perthshire went to the polls on 7 November 1963, it was not strange because of the result. It was a comfortable Conservative hold in a safe Scottish Conservative seat, and while the concept of ‘a safe Scottish Conservative seat’ may need explanation to younger readers, that was unremarkable in a rather turbulent political year. What was surprising is that the Conservative candidate was the incumbent Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home. The Kinross by-election was a sequel to the high drama of the Conservative conference in Blackpool in October 1963, which was the first occasion on which there was an overt, legal market in political betting. The sitting Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, announced that he would resign; contrary to later mythology, this was months after the end of the Profumo Affair and owed more to mistaken medical advice than political scandal. The conference therefore took place with leading Cabinet ministers regarding it as an audition for the party leadership, and there was an exciting ebb and flow of enthusiasm for the various possible candidates.

Lord Hailsham aroused wild enthusiasm, and equally determined opposition, with a populist campaign in which he renounced his peerage to run as Quintin Hogg, complete with ‘Q’ badges (shades of ‘DD’ in 2005…). Reggie Maudling, the favourite in June, flopped with a badly-delivered and over-thoughtful speech. The favourites after Blackpool were R.A. Butler and, after a well-received speech, the Foreign Secretary Lord Home. In those days there were no elections for the leader of the Conservative Party. They ‘emerged after a process of consultation’ and the consultation process in 1963 was particularly controversial, and the reverberations from 1963 led to the adoption of elections for party leader in 1965. Macmillan, from his hospital bed, was keen to promote non-Butler candidates, and the whips who consulted MPs and peers, and Lord Dilhorne who consulted the Cabinet, seem to have been steering the process against Butler. It is a moment in history that is still debated by historians.

But despite some last-ditch resistance by Butler supporters such as Iain Macleod and Enoch Powell, Lord Home took the Queen’s commission to form a government and was installed as Prime Minister on 18 October. It was politically inconceivable in 1963 to imagine a Prime Minister governing from the red benches of the House of Lords, and it surely is now. If and when the Lords becomes partially or wholly elected (and despite what happened in 2012, all parties have expressed agreement with the principle), that might change, but it can now be regarded as part of the constitution that the Commons should supply the Prime Minister, and Quintin Hogg (Hailsham) and Sir Alec Douglas-Home,helped to cement the principle. Late 1963 was a particularly opportune moment, as until then peers could not disclaim their titles until Anthony Wedgwood Benn finally won his struggle not to be made Viscount Stansgate in the Peerage Act 1963. On 23 October Lord Home renounced his titles; the disclaimer covered an impressive six aristocratic titles.

Parliament was prorogued until 12 November, which covered the brief anomaly of having a Prime Minister who was in neither House of Parliament. The newly-minted commoner, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, had to get into the Commons. There happened to be a vacant seat at the time, following the early death of the Conservative MP for the glens of Kinross and West Perthshire, Gilmour Leburn, in August 1963. Sir Alec’s nomination papers were rushed to Perth with minutes to spare .The prospective Conservative candidate who, in gentlemanly fashion, gave up his seat in Kinross for his senior, did not go unrewarded. George Younger was elected for Ayr in 1964 and had a long and honourable Commons career until he retired in 1992. It has been asserted that there is a convention that Prime Ministers (or even party leaders) do not go to by-elections. This clearly no longer applies, if it ever did – David Cameron even went to Bradford West in 2012 and other leaders have also campaigned in by-elections.

For obvious reasons, it could not have applied in Kinross in 1963, because the Prime Minister was one of the candidates. Sir Alec made full use of the opportunity to set out the Conservative case and re-acquaint himself with the electorate. In the cattle market in Perth on 26 October, he stated his intention that: “There will be no lurch to the right, as it was suggested there might be if I became Prime Minister. There will be no lurch to the left either… we are going straight ahead, and straight ahead fast.” His manifesto stressed economic expansion, higher education and scientific research, an attempt to match Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’ and dispel the aristocratic image, but Perthshire was probably not the place to dissociate one’s image from grouse moors. Sir Alec won the election comfortably, with well over 50 per cent of the vote, although the Conservative share fell because the Liberals had not stood in 1959, but came second in 1963. More ominously, on the same day, Labour gained the marginal seat of Luton in another by-election.

Alec Douglas-Home has gone down in history as one of the stop-gap Prime Ministers. While he was never overwhelmingly popular, neither was he decisively rejected by the electorate (his approval ratings hovered around 44 per cent). His government in 1963-64 presided over a period of rapid economic growth and modernisation and investment in public services, and Labour’s victory in the October 1964 election was very narrow. Perhaps another leader – perhaps Reggie Maudling – could have won it for the Conservatives but Sir Alec’s performance in his only election as party leader was far from disgraceful. Sir Alec retired from the House of Commons in October 1974, returning to the House of Lords as Lord Home of the Hirsel. He bequeathed the constituency to Nicholas Fairbairn who held on by 74 votes over the SNP. His successor was not entirely to Sir Alec’s taste, and – with the cultured disdain that only the Scottish aristocracy can manage – he noted that ‘Yes, I heard that he campaigned in Crieff wearing lilac gloves’.

Fairbairn’s death in 1995 caused a more conventional by-election shock when the SNP swept to victory and the Conservatives fell to third place, a harbinger of the 1997 wipe-out in Scotland. Other than during general election campaigns, when nobody can claim to be an MP, the three weeks between 18 October and 8 November 1963 were the last time a Prime Minister has not been in the House of Commons. Despite silly claims about the legitimacy of Prime Ministers Callaghan, Major and Brown (this is a parliamentary democracy…) Alec Douglas-Home was Britain’s last unelected Prime Minister. The circumstances were very peculiar – the happenstance that Tony Benn’s Act gave existing hereditary peers a brief window of opportunity to disclaim, which coincided with a particularly turbulent Conservative leadership election. One can confidently expect that a Prime Minister standing in a by-election will not be happening again any time soon. Further reading: D.R. Thorpe Alec Douglas-Home London: Sinclair Stevenson, 1996 J.

Dickie The Uncommon Commoner London: Pall Mall Press, 1964 Leadership and Change: Prime Ministers in the Post-War World - Alec Douglas-Home Thursday, 24 May 2007, 12:00AM Leadership and Change: Prime Ministers in the Post-War World - Alec Douglas-Home D R Thorpe, The Earl of Home Share this lecture Continuing last year's series of lectures, delivered by distinguished guest speakers, to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the War, looking at change in Britain through the eyes of the UK's Prime Ministers. The lecture was introduced by the Earl of Home, the son of Alec Douglas-Home. This is a part of the series Leadership and Change: Prime Ministers in the Post-War World. The other lectures in this series are as follows: Leadership and Change: Prime Ministers in the Post-War World - Alec Douglas-Home D R Thorpe PRIME MINISTERS IN THE POST-WAR WORLD: ALEC DOUGLAS-HOME D.R.

Thorpe After Andrew Bonar Law's funeral in Westminster Abbey in November 1923, Herbert Asquith observed, 'It is fitting that we should have buried the Unknown Prime Minister by the side of the Unknown Soldier'. Asquith owed Bonar Law no posthumous favours, and intended no ironic compliment, but the remark was a serious under-estimate. In post-war politics Alec Douglas-Home is often seen as the Bonar Law of his times, bracketed with his fellow Scot as an interim figure in the history of Downing Street between longer serving Premiers; in Bonar Law's case, Lloyd George and Stanley Baldwin, in Home's, Harold Macmillan and Harold Wilson. Both Law and Home were certainly 'unexpected' Prime Ministers, but both were also 'under-estimated' and they made lasting beneficial changes to the political system, both on a national and a party level.

The unexpectedness of their accessions to the top of the greasy pole, and the brevity of their Premierships (they were the two shortest of the 20th century, Bonar Law's one day short of seven months, Alec Douglas-Home's two days short of a year), are not an accurate indication of their respective significance, even if the precise details of their careers were not always accurately recalled, even by their admirers. The Westminster village is often another world to the general public. Stanley Baldwin was once accosted on a train from Chequers to London, at the height of his fame, by a former school friend. 'It's Baldwin, isn't it?', he asked. 'Harrow, '84?' Baldwin paused in his perusal of The Timescrossword and confirmed the details. His friend leant forward. 'And what are you doing now?' The equivalent moment for Alec Douglas-Home came in retirement travelling back to Berwick-upon-Tweed, when he was engaged in conversation in a railway carriage by an elderly couple. 'My husband and I think it was a great tragedy that you were never Prime Minister', said the lady, as they parted.

'As a matter of fact I was', replied Home, with his customary politeness, adding, 'but only for a very short time.' Home owed the possibility of that very short time indirectly to Tony Benn, erstwhile the Second Viscount Stansgate. Following Benn's determined campaign in the early 1960s for the right to renounce his title, the Peerage Act came on to the Statute Book on 31 July 1963. In January 1963 the Government had promised that the Bill should 'become law in time to take practical effect at, but not before, the next General Election.' But this did not satisfy supporters of the Bill. Further discussion led to the Lords' declaration on 8 May 1963 that 'Surrender should not extinguish the peerage itself' (a crucial factor for Home). The Opposition amendment of 16 July 1963, proposed by Lord Silkin, some think with the encouragement of Lord Salisbury, astute kingmaker, which the Lords endorsed by 105 votes to 25, was that the Act should become operative on receiving the Royal Assent. This followed a fortnight later.

Existing hereditary peers now had a window of twelve months in which to disclaim their Peerages if they so wished. The second Viscount Stansgate disclaimed his at once. As the leadership of the Conservative Party was increasingly a matter of speculation in the summer of 1963, this Act, and the date of its implementation, subtly altered the ground rules. Both Lord Hailsham and Lord Home, who had discussed the matter in May 1963, were theoretically potential future candidates, if they so wished, but only it seemed after the next election, when the matter would have been resolved one way or another without their participation. One of the myths of this time is that the Profumo affair shortened Macmillan's Premiership. In fact, it did precisely the opposite. In the summer of 1963 Macmillan had been seriously thinking of stepping down, in which case his successor would almost certainly have been Reginald Maudling, then on a political high. The Profumo Affair removed that possibility. It would have been seen as an admission of failure by Macmillan to have gone in the midst of that furore. Macmillan decided to stay on and to fight the next election.

Only his prostate condition in October - 'the hand of fate' as Macmillan called it - led him to resign, almost welcoming by then the opportunity of a way out. At this moment, thanks to the amended Peerage Act, Hailsham and Home were now papabile - and without the years of scrutiny that had attended figures such as Rab Butler, Reginald Maudling or Edward Heath, though at that stage only Hailsham was considered a possibility for a future disclaimer. Although Home and Hailsham were senior figures, they were fresh faces in this particular race. 'Enter Mr Hogg and Mr Home', as Anthony Howard put it in the New Statesman, an article which concentrated Home's mind on the options. The subsequent Conservative Leadership contest in October 1963 is still surrounded by many inaccurate myths. Suffice it to quote Professor Vernon Bogdanor, 'The outcome, the selection of Lord Home, cannot be said seriously to have misrepresented Conservative opinion at the time.' Criticism of the Queen too is unfounded.

To quote Professor Bogdanor again, 'If the Conservative Party was divided, as it clearly was, the Queen could only compromise the position of the monarchy if she were to take part in that conflict.' The point that is often overlooked is that not only was Rab Butler not going to get the leadership, but he knew that himself, which is why he dreaded the moment of Macmillan's retirement. John Morrison, Chairman of the 1922 Committee, had told Butler in the summer of 1963 that 'the chaps won't have you', and when that autumn Butler met Maudling by chance in the street outside Maudling's Hans Place apartment, he said to him in the course of the conversation, 'Of course, I'll be very pleased to serve under you Reggie, when the time comes.' Hailsham's candidature was ended by the Americans, who let it be known through the British Ambassador in Washington, Lord Harlech, that Lord Hailsham as Prime Minister would be the end of the special relationship. The two serious candidates by October were Home and Maudling, and after a trawl of the whole party inside and outside Parliament Home was given what was in essence the 'first option'.

Crucially, Lord Home did not kiss hands when he was called to the Palace, but agreed to see first if he was able to form a government. The acceptance of the Foreign Office by Butler, the central figure, established Home as Prime Minister. So Rab Butler, mindful of Peel and the split over the Corn Laws in the 1840s, made Home Prime Minister, not Harold Macmillan. By then there was no point in Hailsham, or Maudling being 'plus royal que le roi', and in Lord Beaverbrook's vivid phrase, 'Home had the loaves and the fishes'. When Home asked Maudling to stay on in the Treasury, he also told him that if he (Home) was unable to form a Government, then Maudling would be the politician the Queen would then invite to try to form an administration. Although Iain Macleod and Enoch Powell declined to serve, Home was able to form a government without them.

If Home's entry into Downing Street was unusual - the nearest parallel was Queen Victoria's invitation to Lord Hartington in 1880 to try to form a government - the first few weeks were constitutionally unprecedented, as for a short time after Home had disclaimed his title to seek election in the by-election at Kinross and West Perthshire, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was a member of neither House of Parliament, a position to be repeated, regarding the Foreign Secretaryship, between October 1964 and January 1965, after Patrick Gordon-Walker had lost his seat at Smethwick at the General Election. Home ensured then that the Conservatives did not make political capital of this constitutional anomaly, as, in a way unimaginable today, Labour had let the matter take its natural course when he was seeking election to the Commons. Home had a difficult legacy. The Conservatives had been in office for twelve years and third term governments, rare phenomena in any case, are by their very nature often unpopular, as Tony Blair has recently admitted. Although the Conservatives still had a comfortable majority from their 1959 General Election victory, despite some dramatic by-election losses, there was an atmosphere of damage limitation.

Home faced in Harold Wilson, a formidable Leader of the Opposition, a figure wholly in tune with the Zeitgeist of the age. An election was due within a year, and few expected many fresh initiatives. They were to be proved wrong. From his first day in Downing Street Home concentrated on putting the Conservatives in a position to win what would then have been an unprecedented fourth term. In the event he failed by the narrowest of margins, a few hundred votes judiciously redistributed in the most marginal seats would have altered the overall result. The Conservatives were 11 percentage points behind Labour when Alec Home became Prime Minister; twelve months later they suffered defeat by only 0.7 per cent, indeed the Labour share of the vote (at 44.1 per cent) was only 0.3 per cent higher than in October 1959 when they had lost by 100 seats. Home's Cabinet contained a blend of experienced figures and the leading politicians of the next generation. But it was not a Cabinet that was always at ease with itself. The events of October 1963 cast a long shadow and there was a sense of jostling for post-election positions, probably in Opposition.

Rab Butler became Foreign Secretary, the post he had wanted in 1957, and which made him then only the second politician after Sir John Simon to have held all three of the great offices of state below the Premiership. But the appointment was not the one by which his career will be remembered. He was moving into the political arena where the Prime Minister had acknowledged expertise, and in which he had relatively little experience, apart from his unhappy pre-war spell as Under Secretary at the time of Munich, a point he acknowledged in his first major speech in the Commons as Foreign Secretary. 'I know that I shall greatly profit by the Prime Minister's own experience and great skill as Foreign Secretary in conducting my own duties as Foreign Secretary in succession to him.' Butler, his spirit crushed by three failures to become Prime Minister, in 1953 (with hindsight Butler thought this his best opportunity), 1957 and 1963, was de-mob happy, and even more prone to his famous Rabbisms. 'Mind you, Alec's an awfully good man, really', he would say at meetings.

And when he visited Moscow University on his Russian tour, he amazed his hosts by asking through the interpreter, 'Is this university state-aided?' More seriously, just before the election in October Butler told a reporter that 'things might start slipping in the last few days', adding, inaccurately as it proved, 'they won't slip towards us.' When Home published in retirement what proved a bestselling political memoir, Butler offered it to weekend guests at his home at Stanstead, asking if they would care 'to look at this book on fishing.' Maudling continued as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Henry Brooke as Home Secretary. Hailsham was Lord President and later, in addition, in charge of Education and Science. Duncan Sandys, Peter Thorneycroft, Freddie Erroll and Geofrey Rippon were also prominent figures. Two of the key figures were in non-departmental jobs.

Selwyn Lloyd, the most loyal of the loyal, was recalled to the Cabinet as Leader of the House and Lord Privy Seal (he had been the principal victim of Macmillan's Night of the Long Knives in July 1962), and provided Home with not only support and encouragement, but also the riposte about Harold Wilson being 'the 14th Mr Wilson'. John Hare, now Viscount Blakenham, was Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and Party Chairman. Blakenham was the principal advocate of an early election, so much so that he was dubbed 'the March Hare'. Home, rightly, decided to follow Harold Macmillan's advice and play it as long as possible constitutionally, even into November. (He later regretted not going to the country even later than 15 October.) But the key figure in terms of the legacy the Home government would leave was in fact the man destined to be Home's successor as Party Leader, Edward Heath, the President of the Board of Trade. With his combination of reforming zeal and determination to modernise, Heath had published a bill in January 1964 to abolish resale price maintenance.

Its effects can be seen today in the cut price stickers on the piles of books in any high street Waterstone's. The free market concept was an ideal banner for the Conservative modernisers, but it threatened the livelihood of many small shopkeepers. A vociferous campaign, orchestrated by the Daily Express, fuelled sectional protests and a back bench rebellion. On 11 March 1964, 21 Conservatives voted against Heath's bill and 17others abstained. In a later division the government had a majority of only one. The issue was at the heart of the old tensions between free traders and protectionists in the Conservative Party. Modernisers saw a system that legitimised an anti-competitive structure, at levels fixed by the manufacturers of branded goods, as incompatible with the radical business restructuring needed for Britain's trading survival. Caution was urged by those who had the interests of the traditionally Tory shopkeepers in mind. Home, who believed industrial modernisation was vital, backed Heath, even though the Cabinet, as they had been in 1959 when the issue had last been raised, were divided.

'The government had committed themselves to a policy of modernising Britain and promoting a more efficient user of resources', Home told the Cabinet on 14 January 1964. 'This policy would fail to carry conviction if they were to tolerate the continuance of a practice so manifestly at variance with it.' After much controversy and backbench revolts, the Bill passed its third reading on 13 May. The main impact of the abolition was positive. It showed that the government had not run out of new ideas and was not prepared to have economic policy dictated by vested interest groups, even if these were traditional Conservative supporters, and as such it was the harbinger of even more decisive changes in the future. Many Tories feared that the whole issue would be electorally disadvantageous, but this proved statistically unfounded.

'Once past the House of Commons', David Butler and Anthony King concluded in their book on the 1964 Election, 'the bill aroused little further controversy, and resale price maintenance figured hardly at all at the election.' Another example of Home's decisiveness was his tough stance on trade unions, giving no legislative help over the Rookes v Barnard case in January 1964, when the House of Lords upheld the right of a BOAC employee at Heathrow Airport to damages for unfair dismissal because of a closed shop policy by the Association of Engineering and Shipbuilding Draughtsmen. He also made regulation 6 of the 1920 Emergency Powers Act a permanent legislative tool, ironically to prove a great help to Harold Wilson during the 1966 seamen's strike. Within a few weeks of entering Downing Street, Home had to co-ordinate the British response to the news of President Kennedy's assassination. There were no indications that 22 November would prove such a dramatic and tragic day. Home had been in the morning to the TUC headquarters to view and discuss an education presentation, and he followed this with talks on Northern Ireland with the province's Premier, Captain Terence O'Neill.

At 5.15 he was then driven to Arundel Castle, with his wife Elizabeth, for his first weekend break since taking office. He was met at Arundel Castle by the breathless Duke of Norfolk, who informed him of the breaking news from Dallas. The BBC were already in contact with Arundel Castle, and after a hurried supper Home was driven back to London to the BBC's Lime Grove studios, where his speech on behalf of the British nation was simple and dignified, unlike that of George Brown, the Deputy Labour leader, who in the words of one his civil servants, 'declined in efficiency as the day progressed.' It was the moment when Home really established himself as the public face of the nation, as became clear from correspondents from many parts of the country, and not all by any means Conservative voters. Home met the new American President Lyndon B. Johnson after Kennedy's funeral, but his first substantive talks with the new American President came in a visit to Washington in February 1964. Johnson, the Texas bruiser, was rather wary of the new British Premier, as he was for Johnson such an unknown quantity. The Beatles were taking America by storm at the time and Johnson attempted humour initially.

'I like your advance guard', he quipped. 'But don't you think they need haircuts?' If Johnson thought that Home would be a pushover in talks - especially, for him, on the contentious issue of the sale of British Leyland buses to Cuba - he had a rude awakening. Harold Macmillan had famously described Home to the Queen as 'steel painted as wood', and this certainly became clear in Washington that week. 'There is no question of dictation by the United States Government to this country over commercial relations with Cuba', said Home. 'This is a subject which is decided solely by the British Government.' And so it was, to Johnson's undisguised fury. When Butler was in Washington two months later, the matter still rankled, and Johnson waved a wad of dollar notes at Butler, saying that if Britain was so hard up that she needed to trade with Cuba, he could pay for the cancelled order himself. But the deal was concluded. Home showed similar steel in his second spell at the Foreign Office with Andrei Gromyko - the abominable no-man - over the expulsion from Britain of 105 Russian spies. At the forefront of Home's mind was always a possible post-election fourth term.

He saw no reason why this should not be achieved and ordered the Cabinet to conduct business on the expectation that they would be returned to office. During the course of his year in Downing Street he promised Christopher Soames, then the Agriculture Minister, the reversion to the Foreign Secretaryship if the Conservatives won. Enoch Powell was pencilled in to return to the Cabinet with a brief to reform Whitehall. No plans were made to recall Iain Macleod, certainly not after the Spectator affair in January 1964, an episode that in Home's view tipped the balance against the Conservatives in October 1964. In January 1964 Randolph Churchill published The Fight for the Tory Leadership, an insider's account, with material from Harold Macmillan, of the previous autumn's political upheavals. Iain Macleod, by now editor of the Spectator, in addition to his backbench responsibilities, was outraged.

On 17 January he published a review under the title 'The Tory Leadership', describing the book as 'Mr Macmillan's trailer for the screen play of his memoirs.' But the phrase that went at once into the political lexicon was that about the supposed 'magic circle' of Old Etonians who had conspired to make one of their own Conservative leader, over and above better qualified candidates, notably Butler, Macleod's candidate. Alec Home was deeply saddened by the ensuing row, which raked up all the controversies of October 1963, not for his own feelings or reputation but because of what he considered the irreparable damage to the Conservative Party's chances in the next election. Macleod, surprisingly for one with sharp political antennae, did not anticipate the furore he would cause. 'He was not forgiven', The Times wrote on his premature death in 1970.

'It was a political failing on his part that he took so long to appreciate that he had disqualified himself for the highest office.' Home took advice from Harold Macmillan on what he should say if Macleod persisted in his attacks, notably the point that the Conservative Party had not been able to find a leader from within its own ranks in the Commons. Macmillan advised Home to say that it was a sad reflection on journalism that the profession had not been able to find an editor of the Spectatorfrom within its own ranks, but had had to resort to Iain Macleod. The Macleod article came at exactly the wrong moment (when would have been the right one?), as the Conservatives were picking up some momentum, particularly on the domestic front. In the week of the article, Home was in South Wales on a pre-election tour, when statistics showed that less than one family in three owned their home in 1951 when the Conservatives had come into office. Now it was nearly half.

''A property owning democracy is becoming a reality', Home said in his speech in Swansea, a reference to his mentor in pre-war days, the Unionist MP for the Scottish Universities, Noel Skelton, who had first advocated the principle in Constructive Conservatism in 1924. 'Until our educated and politically minded democracy', wrote Skelton, 'has become predominantly a property-owning democracy, neither the national equilibrium nor the balance of the life of the individual will be restored.' It was a message that was taken up by Skelton's two principal protégés, Anthony Eden and Alec Home, future Prime Ministers both. Not that it was necessary to remind Alec Home, but on the eve of the 1964 campaign, Eden, by then Earl of Avon, wrote to Home as the manifesto was being written, reiterating, 'A property-owning democracy is the aim.' In the Cabinet room, Home proved a formidable chairman, pushing the agenda onwards, being crisp in his summings-up and shrewd in his preparation of the agenda.

One of the first things he did was to cut a swathe through the ever-burgeoning number of ad hoc Cabinet Committees, many of which had now run their natural course. This reorganization was symptomatic of the pragmatic approach Home brought to his task as Cabinet Chairman. Indeed no less a distinguished mandarin than Sir Burke Trend, who was Cabinet Secretary under four Prime Ministers, believed that Alec Home was the most orderly and efficient of all in his conduct of Cabinet business. Another under-estimated change that Home introduced was the so-called Douglas-Home rules whereby the Civil Service is permitted to talk with Opposition leaders in the lead-up to a General Election, so as to expedite more efficiently changes of policy in the event of a change of government. This is now such an established part of the political procedure that it is often forgotten how relatively recently the system was introduced, and by whom. Home was courteous and brisk with memos. Colin Cowdrey, the England cricket captain, and a notable slip fielder, wrote to him once on MCC matters as 'Sir Alec'. Home replied, 'You can drop the Sir, if you ever drop anything.' Above all, there was never any masquerading or spin by Alec Home.

What you saw was what you got. Even his political opponents acknowledged that his integrity was absolute, another similarity with Bonar Law, of whom Lloyd George said, during the 1922 General Election campaign, that Law was 'honest to the point of naivety', which proved a telling advantage with the British electorate after six years of Lloyd George. Home was the embodiment of Walter Bagehot's ideal, 'Sensible men of substantial means are what we wish to be ruled by.' Prime Ministers fall into many categories. As Prime Minister, Home may not have been an innovator, changing the political landscape, like Margaret Thatcher; or a reformer, bringing about a major change of direction in policy, like Clement Attlee. He was certainly not an egoist, living for the adrenalin of office, like Lloyd George and others. He did not change the political weather, as Churchill said of one who never even became Prime Minister, Joe Chamberlain. Home came in a different category of Prime Ministers, as a balancer chosen to bring different wings together, a role that was second nature to Stanley Baldwin or James Callaghan.

Just as Bonar Law was chosen as Conservative leader because he was not Walter Long or Austen Chamberlain, so Alec Home was chosen because he was not Rab Butler or Quintin Hailsham. But like James Callaghan he was a Prime Minister who came at the tail-end of a long period of dominance by his party, a position not enviable in politics, and one that both Home and Callaghan shared with Lord Rosebery in the 1890s. The inevitable problems faced by Rosebery, Home and Callaghan at such an unpropitious time in the electoral cycle were thus exacerbated by the perceived view that they were not destined to be in office for long. Of these three Premiers Home was by far the most successful, leaving his party best equipped to regain power, something it did less than five years after he gave up the leadership, whereas for the Liberals at the turn of the century, the process took ten years, and for the Labour Party at the end of the century eighteen years.

Although the change did not take place whilst he was Prime minister, but in February 1965 in his short period as Leader of the Opposition, Home's review of the procedure for choosing the Conservative Party leader was to have a profound effect on the party, and on the executive's relationship with the Monarch at a time of vacancy. It is often claimed that this new system, which itself has undergone many changes in subsequent years, was the brain child of the back-bench MP Humphrey Berkeley. But Berkeley, with his own proposals, courteously considered by Home, was knocking at an already open door, as Berkeley himself acknowledged. The first public surprise about Home's early days in No 10 was the extent to which he was interested in and knowledgeable about domestic affairs. For those who had experience of his time as resident Minister of State at the Scottish Office from 1951-1955 this was only to be expected.

In those years, when Home travelled the length and bread of his native country, from Cape Wrath to John O'Groats, past Bettyhill on the Northern seaboard, thorough the Highlands and Islands, as well as the great industrial conurbations, there were few domestic concerns that at some stage did not cross his desk in St Andrews House in Edinburgh. He followed a path of which Noel Skelton, who had died prematurely in 1935, would have approved. In Mull, he had talks on the reorganization of local Government, at the Turnberry Hotel in Ayrshire he met on a regular basis with the Scottish Farmers' Union to discuss their manifold problems. He worked on questions of crofting and depopulation in the Highlands and Islands. He had a sharp eye for administrative detail. Once a civil servant handed him a draft that spoke of proposed changes to the system of tied cottages 'by regulation'. Home, the experienced parliamentarian, swiftly changed this to 'by legislation'. The rating system, schools, transport, unemployment, health care were all problems with which he was concerned in these years.

Even Home's opponents admitted his profound knowledge of Foreign Affairs, from his days at the Commonwealth Office and Foreign Office from 1955 to 1963; what they had not expected was his expertise in the niceties of domestic policy. For one whose original mentor had been Noel Skelton, the originator of the concept of the 'property owning democracy' among One Nation Tories, this was only to be expected. Satisfyingly, one of the earliest projects he had worked on with James Stuart, the Secretary of State, in the early 1950s had been the proposal to build a Forth Road Bridge, which was finally accomplished in the closing days of his Premiership. Foreign events also loomed large - Cyprus, where civil war had broken out, Rhodesia and the growing threat of a rebel breakaway (a topic which involved Home in his second spell as Foreign Secretary in the early 1970s), clashes on the borders of Yemen and Aden, and a row with Spain over frigates. In July Home chaired the Commonwealth Prime Ministers' conference in London, in which the question of Southern Rhodesia was of central importance.

Clashes between America and North Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin also contributed to the volatile atmosphere that summer. Home showed a sure hand in all these crises - Rab Butler was quite happy to leave the day to day response to Downing Street, a rare example of the Foreign Office not being discomfited by No 10's involvement in Foreign Affairs. Gradually Conservative fortunes and morale were on the rise. 'The government could be seen to be governing' was one Press comment at this time. There was a growing feeling that, against all the odds, the Tories might just win another term. After Parliament had risen on 31 July (the first anniversary of the Peerage Act becoming law) Home wrote to all Cabinet Ministers warning against complacency over the summer months. In his first six months in office Home had given 64 'full dress' speeches and 150 whistle stop homilies. A pre-election tour in Yorkshire in the summer had included a visit to Huddersfield, Harold Wilson's birthplace. The announcement of the election date was made on 18 September, with polling day set for 15 October.

This would be five years and one week since Macmillan's victory on 8 October 1959, so the parliament was the longest since the interval between elections had been reduced to five years in 1911. The result - Labour 317 seats, Conservatives 304, and Liberals 9 - was also the closest in living memory, an overall majority of three once the Speaker had been re-elected. Even then three events on 15 October 1964, had they taken place twenty four hours earlier would almost certainly have guaranteed a Conservative victory. As the polls closed (at 9 p.m. in those days, which is why Wilson successfully arranged with the BBC for the popular TV comedy Steptoe and Son to be delayed till later than its usual slot in the Thursday evening's schedules) news came of the downfall of the Russian leader Nikita Khruschev. Indeed the early election broadcasts were far more concerned with this breaking news than exit polls, so dramatic and unexpected was it. There was also news of the successful Chinese nuclear explosion. Both of these global events could well have induced a sense of 'Safety First' that would have denied Wilson victory had they happened earlier.

A more parochial event, if handled more subtly, could also have helped to change the result. The narrowness of the Labour victory could have been even more so if the Conservative MP for Brighton Kemp Town had not arranged for two hundred of the ladies from his constituency organisation to travel on an all day cross-channel shipping trip to Boulogne, leaving at 6 a.m. and returning in the small hours. Labour won Brighton Kemp Town, its first ever seat in Sussex, by 7 votes after 7 recounts. Subsequently, Home always said Boulogne not Calais would be forever engraved on his heart, that and Iain Macleod, towards whom his private anger was unbridled. Home shrewdly realised in his disappointment that the narrowness of defeat was actually a far worse result than a loss by 20 - 30 seats, as it guaranteed another election before long, in which, such are the vagaries of the electoral system and voters' feelings, Wilson would certainly be given a larger majority. Indeed, Wilson increased his majority to 97 in March 1966, by which time Home was no longer Conservative leader.

Home stood down in July 1965, one of the few party leaders to leave with dignity and at a time of his own choosing (Harold Wilson was another eleven years later), and in the first outing for the new rules he had established Heath was elected leader, defeating Reginald Maudling and Enoch Powell. But this was not the end of Home's story in the upper reaches of the Conservative Party. Lord Rosebery once said that an ex-Prime Minister in the Commons was a danger to shipping, but that to include such a figure in a Cabinet was for the successor 'a fleeting and dangerous luxury.' There was never any question of Heath flinching from such a choice, and in June 1970 Home became Foreign Secretary for the second time, a figure of ballast and stability in Heath's administration, particularly over the Rhodesian rebellion. Few Prime Ministers have had such a useful post-No 10 career. The nearest parallel is Balfour, who also served as Foreign Secretary after his spell in No 10. Home showed all his successors as party leader absolute loyalty, there was no sniping or tacit criticism whatever, not of Heath, Thatcher or Major.

When Mrs Thatcher became Conservative leader in February 1975 she at once engaged in a lengthy correspondence with Home on foreign matters, on which she confessed ignorance that she needed to rectify. Home obliged and was a vital help in the four years of opposition Mrs Thatcher endured before entering No 10. In the early 1990s during the first Gulf war he was rung up on a regular basis by the Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd to be kept in touch with developments. Home outlived even Churchill, dying in October 1995 at the age of 92. Home may have been Prime Minister 'for a very short time', but in that time he added a quiet dignity to British public life, despite the ridicule of the modish satirists, and surprising many pundits and politicians by his sense of clarity, efficiency, firmness and patriotism at a time when society seemed to be on an inexorable downward path in standards, propriety and sense of responsibility. After years at the Commonwealth Office and the Foreign Office Home had a clear understanding of Britain's place in a transitional post-war world.

He knew that the former American Secretary of State Dean Acheson had spoken an unpalatable truth when he said that Britain had lost an Empire and failed to find a rôle. 'We have shed a terrible lot of power', he wrote reflectively over the Christmas recess in 1963 to Sir Michael Fraser of the Conservative Research Department, 'but it is useless to cry over spilt milk.' In the days of the Cold War, he was completely unsentimental about the Soviet Union and consistently pursued a policy of firmness, best evinced by the expulsion during his second spell as Foreign Secretary of 105 Russian spies from Britain. This attitude conditioned his views on African issues, notably the Congo, especially during its first 18 months of independence, when he emphasised the need for 'a government which will keep order and prevent a Communist takeover'. 'Had he been of another generation, he would have been of the Grenadiers and the 1914 heroes', observed Harold Macmillan.

'He gives that impression by a curious mixture of great courtesy, and even of yielding to pressure, with underlying rigidity on matters of principle.' Home's Premiership was a one off, as Britain stood on the cusp of profound social change, and was of a kind never to be repeated. There were failures and misapprehensions inevitably. On his return to the Commons in November 1963 Home was shocked by the changes that had come about in parliamentary procedure since he had last spoken from the Front bench in July 1951, and by the sheer rudeness of many members. In the face of heckling, even abuse from the Opposition benches, he never established himself as a domineering parliamentarian. Nor did he ever fully come to grips with the demands of television, and the autocue. Both were areas where the Leader of the Opposition Wilson excelled. Interestingly, Home's most successful television broadcast was on the death of President Kennedy, when he spoke from the heart, not from the auto-cue the backroom boys had provided for him. Yet as Dominick Sandbrook has shown in his study of this period Never Had It So Good, society in the early sixties was not one headlong rush to hedonism.

There was a silent majority that wanted the old values, who were mistrustful of trend-setting and the lowest common denominator world of the media. For such people, and not only such people, Home appeared as a Prime Minister well fitted to represent Britain's interests. There was an innate inner calm and he never remotely debased the office. Home had many of the good points of his predecessors without their downside - like Balfour, he was willing to serve in Cabinet, after having held the top post, but was never aloof and indecisive; like Bonar Law, who freed the Cabinet Secretariat from its Lloyd George Garden Suburb connotations, but without his sometimes angular responses, he renewed the system of Cabinet Committees, a progeny of the Secretariat, and liberated the Civil Service from its purdah, regarding the Opposition; like Baldwin, but without his long periods of inactivity, he represented a kind of country viewpoint that saw Westminster as a part, a necessary part of public life, but by no means the be-all and end-all.

Just as Baldwin really did like leaning over a fence in Worcestershire and scratching a pig, so Home was most at ease, with his labrador, fishing on the Tweed, as his portrait in the National Portrait Gallery shows him. He was never seduced by the metropolitan world. As Selwyn Lloyd said, without any sense of irony, of the Conservative Party's difficulties in the late 1960s, 'the trouble is that only Alec and myself are provincials.' The world that followed was a more technocratic, even soulless one. Like Attlee, Home was a down to earth figure of common sense, who left flashy charisma to others, got on with the job and made time for the cricket scores, as befitted the only Prime Minister to have played first class cricket. Home was the last flourishing of a particular strand of British public life, 'an utterly authentic evocation of deep, traditional, landed Toryism' in the words of Peter Hennessy. 'He was like the very last of the steam locomotives which were on their twilight journeys at exactly this time. Perhaps he was a kind of human Coronation Scot.

Or more likely, given his country pursuits, he was Mallard, pulling one last express from King's Cross to Edinburgh and sounding its distinctive whistle in a plaintive farewell as it crossed the Royal Border Bridge above the River Tweed at Berwick.' And in the words of the family motto, he was 'True to the end'.

Question: Kinross and West Perthshire was the constituency of which post-war Prime Minister?
Answer: ALEC DOUGLAS-HOME